Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Zoom court hearings in Texas are here to stay. A backlog of thousands of jury trials caused by Covid-19 must be addressed. Access to justice for the poor must be improved. Racial prejudice – and the perception of bias – is a “disease” in the Texas justice system. Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht delivered his State of Judiciary address to a joint session of the Texas legislature Tuesday by live video.
Evan Young and Jason Villalba helped draft pending legislation to create complex business litigation courts in Texas. Last week, The Texas Lawbook interviewed them.
Jason Villalba: When you are dealing with billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are on the line, you don’t want to be rolling the dice. There needs to be a judicial ecosystem in place that better handles these types of cases. Having predictable outcomes is crucial in these large business disputes. Texas needs something like Delaware Chancery Courts to put us on the same global scale.Corporate executives and a handful of their lawyers want to create a new specialized court system that focuses only on complex commercial disputes similar to the chancery courts in Delaware - but with a Texas twist. The proposed Texas business court would have appointed judges, juries and its own business appellate court. It also has opponents who argued that there is nothing wrong with the current civil court system and judges elected by citizens. The Texas Lawbook has both sides arguments and in-depth details of the business court proposal.
A hotly divided Texas Supreme Court decided Friday that the Texas Constitution prevents them from deciding – at least not at this time – whether ERCOT is a governmental body that has sovereign immunity and is thus protected from lawsuits. But four justices, including Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, disagree: “The answer to the immunity issue in this case has become perhaps more important to the public than even to the parties. The parties want to know. The public wants to know. The court refuses to answer.”
The Texas Lawbook is pleased to announce that Anna Butler, former director of operations for Patterson Thoma Family Office and former Dallas Business Journal managing editor, has joined our news team to lead our corporate transactions coverage. As this article states, Anna will take The Lawbook's deal coverage to the next level.
Tasha Grinnell started at Neiman Marcus exactly one year ago. Days after she started, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Stores needed to be closed and some employees furloughed. Two months later, the luxury department store filed for bankruptcy - a brutal and costly process that Grinnell and her predecessor Tracy Preston conquered. "We had a lot of balls in the air, and we still do," Grinnell, who became Neiman Marcus' interim GC on Friday, told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview.
Griddy Energy, a retail power supplier facing a slew of civil lawsuits as a result of charges from the February winter storm, says it has less than $10 million in assets but owes ERCOT, CenterPoint Energy and Oncor three times that amount.
Dallas trial lawyer Mark Werbner, who was a pupil of the great Jim Coleman, partnered for two decades with Dick Sayles and then practiced the past two years at Winston & Strawn, has started his own law firm. Werbner, who made global headlines in 2014 when he led an historic billion-dollar jury victory against a Middle Eastern bank accused of aiding terrorists, plans to do more plaintiff’s litigation and white-collar criminal defense work.
Exactly 358 days after the Texas Supreme Court issued its first Covid-19-related emergency order closing most state courtrooms to in-person hearings and trials, the justices issued their 36th order Friday officially lifting the statewide ban. But the pandemic caused a backlog of thousands of civil and criminal jury trials that Texas Chief Justice Nathan Hecht told The Texas Lawbook needs to be addressed.
When the biggest corporations in the world – Toyota, Walmart, Phillip Morris, Boeing and Huawei – needed a lawyer in East Texas, they called Sherman’s Clyde Siebman. So did single moms, the elderly and veterans. Siebman, a zealous advocate for the right to trial by jury, died Friday. He was 62.
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